Wednesday, April 27, 2011

I have decided to make an ABC unit for my class next year. I've been looking and looking for something that would help my students remember letter sounds but I haven't been able to find any. Finally, I just decided that I would have to make them. Each one takes quite a while to make so I'll be putting them up on teacherspayteachers one at a time. The first unit up is for the letter A and I have also included a unit on vowels as well. The whole unit is 51 pages long. If you have any questions about them please let me know!

Thursday, April 14, 2011

One of the 1st grade classrooms at our school has little chicks. They got the eggs on Monday, have been keeping them in the incubator, and now they have hatch! Mrs. Erickson was nice enough to let us barge in on her everyday to watch as they made their way out of their shells to become the cute little chicks they are now. Even though we're not focusing on life cycles or animals this month I wanted to use this experience to reinforce something about life cycles. Since we have been watching these eggs and chicks all week today we decided to put together a book on how a chick hatches. First, I had the kids help me put each page in order and them they cut out their own pages and we stapled their books. They loved them!

Growing Patterns! We are also focusing on growing patterns this month. Since we studied money last month I am using it for our growing patterns. Each day we make a new line for our pattern. The kids are really picking it up! I just put Velcro on the back of the plastic coins and paper money.

We are doing a plant unit this month. Here are a couple of things we are doing. First, we are trying to grow lima beans-that's what's in the window! So far nothing has happened but we're not giving up hope. It's only been a week. Another thing we are doing is a flower garden. It has finally started to grow, we have three little buds popping up. Each of my students planted a flower so it shouldn't be too much longer before the whole box is full of flowers! I have a plant unit lesson plan up on teachers pay teachers. It's called Plant Unit (7 Lesson Plans).